tim's experiment

I have to thank local golf enthusiasts for providing a great deal of innocent amusement for those of us who have no strong feelings about the game, and perhaps subscribe to the observation – first recorded in 1910 and often misattributed in a crisper version to Mark Twain — “to play golf is to spoil an otherwise enjoyable walk.”

We get it. To have a golf course to play on if you like golf is nice. To have three courses to play on is even better. And to see one of them defiled by the construction of a public housing estate is distressing. Quite apart from the loss of eight holes, there is the prospect of playing a rich man’s game under the windows of thousands of publicly housed paupers. Might someone laugh at your scuffed shots?

Still the creativity displayed at recent hearings on the government’s plan to use part of a golf course for housing speaks of desperation.

Let us start with the owl. This owl, needless to say a rare and threatened species, could apparently be found roosting in one of the trees which is likely to be removed when the golf holes go.

This is not a convincing argument at all. A golf course is not a nature reserve. Those strips of woodland are not provided as a refuge for homeless hooters; they are just there to keep the golfers far enough apart to reduce accidents.

Meanwhile the creation of the course itself requires the construction of a wholly artificial landscape. Large quantities of fertiliser encourage the grass; generous dollops of weedkiller discourage its competition. Wild animals which might threaten the grass (e.g. pigs) or the golfers (e.g. pythons) are vigorously discouraged.

A golf course, in short, has all the disadvantages of a zoo and none of the compensating advantages.

Then we come to the question of whether the truncated (two-and-a-half courses) remains of the facility will still be enough for the purposes of entertaining visiting events, one or two of which, we were told, could give Hong Kong a “big boost”.

As a piece of geometry this does not add up. It is a characteristic of international golf contests that all the participants play on the same 18 holes. That leaves the space occupied by the remaining 28 holes in which organisers could surely fit the usual infrastructure of tents, car parks, television towers and what have you.

As a piece of economics it does not make sense either. It appears that just as no millionaire fraudster fails to find a lawyer who can explain his innocence, no international spasm of sport fails to find an economist who will predict a “big boost” for the staging country or territory.

These claims have lately been subjected to careful examination and been found to be wholly fictitious. Even big sport circuses like the Olympics or the World Cup Finals do not move the needle in a substantial economy and putting them on absorbs a large amount of money paid in advance, little of which comes back.

Foreign spectators at events of this kind come in three categories. There are those who were already in the country, resident or visiting, and took in the sport as an added attraction. Then there are those who were planning a visit, for business or pleasure, and changed their schedule to include the sport as well. The third, smallest category, comprises those who actually make a special trip.

Analysis of the audience routinely finds that most of them are locals. If they had not stumped up for tickets, hot dogs, jugs of Carlsberg etc they would have spent similar amounts on other entertainments on offer locally.

It may be that the “big boost” on offer is reputational rather than economic. Hong Kong has had some rough press lately, particularly (by coincidence) in some countries where golf is a major participant sport.

Unfortunately these are places where the ability to assemble a cast of young millionaires and watch them fight over a large pile of Saudi money is not going to do a great deal for our reputation. It’s a better story than the current efforts to encourage and recruit international bounty hunters, but that’s a low bar.

The most cherishable argument against desecrating our palace of golf came from a local resident, who reported that he had resorted to his nearest temple, and there cast the fortune-telling sticks which are a common facility in such places. The sticks had warned that Hong Kong would face a catastrophic future if the threatened holes were replaced by public housing.

Now I have an open mind on this sort of stuff. It is not the Hymns Ancient and Modern/Book of Common Prayer kind of thing which featured in my youth. Still, every New Year I am down at our local temple, putting the permitted three joss sticks in a sandbox in front of a multi-story gold-plated God. I spin the windmill, beat the drum, make a contribution to the temple expenses and buy a small lucky charm which we hang inside the front door.

There is more to life than science, logic and “common sense”. I do not claim to know what that “more” might be but we all have our own ways of acknowledging that it is there.

So I am happy to respect the views of those people who suppose that the fortune sticks, or the various other things used for this purpose – trained birds, tossed coins, crystal balls – may give some indication of the road ahead.

I am, however, very dubious about the utility of this sort of thing for the makers of detailed town planning decisions. A prudent fortune-telling stick may express a general view on the desirability of golf courses, but a prediction of dire effects for the territory as a whole if the golf club is pruned … strains credulity.

And what, one wonders, is the Town Planning Board to do if some rival prophet, anxious to help the public housing programme, tells it that a precisely opposite message emerged from his close examination of the entrails of slaughtered chickens?

In the end this is no laughing matter. I sympathise with those golf club members asking “Why us?” when other possibilities are being neglected. The PLA’s ample land-holdings are untouchable because of politics, the Jockey Club’s because it shares its proceeds with the government on a large scale. Too late now for a lucrative sideline in golf gambling.

Still, unaccustomed as I am to agreeing with our lovely leaders, Hong Kong has thousands of golfers, and hundreds of thousands of people in horror housing. Business must come before pleasure.

An anonymous but outspoken netizen recently dubbed the Hong Kong Police, or perhaps just the national security specialists, our Gestapo-po. This seems very unfair.

It is a commonplace that some languages spring into use in particular circumstances. Discussions of music can hardly avoid Italian. The writers of restaurant menus instinctively reach for their French. These choices honour the unique historic contributions of the Italians to music and the French to fine food.

It is less clear why discussions of authoritarian regimes or secret police forces always veer in the direction of German.

People often complain that people of my generation make too much of World War Two. Well we grew up with it. All adults had been affected in one way or another. Both of my parents served in the Army; grandparents were dug out of the rubble of their house during the Blitz, aunts and uncles were child evacuees from London. In the 50s bomb gaps still scarred most European cities.

But there can surely be no excuse for younger generations, who seem to have developed the same habit. Even the august Economist has this verbal tic; writing about restrictions on business research companies in China it said this: “In areas like Xinjiang and chipmaking, investigations now appear entirely verboten.” Well OK we want some elegant variation on ‘forbidden’, but why not ‘interdit’ or ‘prohibido’?

Hitler was an awful person and his era in Germany was an awful time, but it only lasted 13 years from 1932 to 1945. Adolf did not invent despotism or genocide, and nor was he the last person to practise them.

It is difficult to assign degrees of nastiness to national leaders but as the 20^th century’s worst mass murderer Hitler trails both Stalin and Mao, who lasted much longer and caused harms with which their surviving citizens are still living.

Michael Lewis wrote after a visit to Berlin that the Germans seemed to have accepted the role of “history’s bad guys”. It is surely time to put this behind us.

Comparisons with the Third Reich are also unfair to our police force, which may no longer be its cuddly old self but has not explored torture, assassination or rounding people up for extermination.

Actually the only thing it has in common with the Gestapo is its size. It is difficult to find an unambiguous figure for either force because they both employ or employed civilians and part-timers, and changed over time. But something between 30 and 40 thousand seems about right.

As the Gestapo had the whole of occupied Europe to deal with and the Hong Kong police only have to worry about tiny Hong Kong this raises an interesting question: do we need so many cops and if so why?

Happily the United Nations has collected a lot of data on the size of police forces which can be accessed here. The usual way of standardising for size is to consider the number of police people per 100,000 population.

Unfortunately this doesn’t really cater for the fact that small places need a certain number of people if they are to have a police force at all. So you get freakish numbers for places like Pitcairn Island (no. of police: 2, no. per 100,000 inhabitants 3,509) the Vatican City (130 cops, 15,439) and Niue (16 cops, 1,038).

Taking the microstates into account, the UN determined that the median ratio per 100,000, which can be considered the norm for a decent-sized country, was 300. It also noticed that in West Asia, Eastern and Southern Europe the figure was more like 400. So Hong Kong’s figure (35,804 with a ratio to population of 477 in 2020) could be considered rather high.

This may be partly a colonial legacy. In the days when the BBC screened documentaries about the then Royal force, the number of people involved in routine call-outs was a constant wonder. A British Z car was a family saloon with two men in it. Its Hong Kong counterpart was a long-wheelbase Landrover containing an expat inspector to represent the interests of the government, a sergeant to give orders, an interpreter to tell the inspector as much of what was going on as it was seemly for him to know, two constables to do the actual work and a driver.

Whatever the cause, Hong Kong’s police to population number seems a bit large compared with the sort of places with which we like to compare ourselves or consider as possible emigration destinations: England and Wales 227, Canada 184, Australia 264, US 242. Denmark, often cited as the world’s happiest country, gets by with 196 and Finland, usually its rival for the title, has 132.

Outstanding in the other direction is our perennial regional rival Singapore, with 44,162 police people giving a police to population ratio of 810. This seems particularly extravagant when compared with the figures for our motherland, which acknowledged 2,000,000 police people – a suspiciously round number – giving a force to population ratio of 143.

This seems to be the sort of figure we might aspire to. But do not hold your breath. Countries run by the army have large armies. Territories run by the police force …

Two stories on the same day nicely illustrated Hong Kong’s attitude to mental illness.

One concerned a legislator (no names or party affiliations, not to protect the guilty but because I have sworn off politics) who suggested that “recovering mental patients” could be shipped across the boundary to the Greater Bay Area to complete their recovery in the bosom of the motherland.

This was too much even for the Standard’s anonymous leader writers, who generally approve of suggestions from pro-government legislators – virtually the only kind we have these days. Whoever Mary Ma was on the relevant day she was quite scathing about the idea: violation of ‘one country two systems’, example of misguided patriotic “babyism”, mental health entirely a matter for Hong Kong, and the public wished mentally ill people to be cared for close to — or better still where possible by — their families.

A more entertaining report said that you could now buy on the usual internet shopping sites tote bags and tee-shirts decorated with the logos of the Castle Peak Mental Hospital and the Siu Lam Psychiatric Centre. The centre is run by the Correctional Services Department and accommodates mentally ill prisoners, including those so ill as to be indigestible by the legal system.

Under the logo, in Chinese, are the words “discharged patients’ souvenir”. I find it difficult to believe that people would take this seriously. Would a discharged patient really want a “souvenir” of what is rarely a pleasant experience? Having been given such a thing, would he wish to flash it in the street?

Still, purchasers reported interesting effects from carrying a bag of this kind. Several claimed that colleagues started treating them more civilly. Some said they felt “safer”. One user was reported as saying that “People gave me their seats on public transport and police would escort me on the streets.”

In fairness to netizens, who are often portrayed as boundlessly gullible, some people thought the bags were a parody. However the government is reportedly taking them seriously. The Customs warned of possible criminal liability for trade mark abuse, the Equal Opportunities people waved the Disabilities Discrimination Ordinance and the hospital management said the public should “understand mental health issues in a positive manner.”

But there we have Hong Kong and mental illness in a nutshell: the wish that the whole problem would go away, preferably to Shenzhen, and a lingering fear of anyone who has a problem of this kind.

These attitudes go back way beyond the handover. Late period colonial governors understood that their duties included turning Hong Kong into a respectable facsimile of a European social democracy: a colony of which citizens of a welfare state need not be ashamed.

So with varying degrees of reluctance colonial civil servants constructed a rather sketchy social security system: public housing, public hospitals, government schools, money for poor people…

And after the handover, when the pressure was off, the same people started surreptitiously dismantling the whole thing. Public housing construction ceased, hospitals started charging for some medicines, universities charged the full cost of some courses.

But there was no need to curtail the provision for mental health because this had simply been missed out in the first place. Hong Kong has, for example, less than 400 psychiatric doctors, about half the number the World Health Organisation recommends for a population of our size.

In official theory we will catch up with the WHO’s recommendation in about 20 years. But given that doctors generally and psychiatrists in particular are warmly welcomed in all the most succulent emigration destinations a more realistic timetable would involve the word “never”.

We also have 600 clinical psychologists, who aspire to help. But they are not doctors, and consequently are not allowed to prescribe drugs. As the treatment regime for the more serious kinds of mental illness usually involves suppressing the symptoms with drugs for a year or two in the hope that the ailing brain will sort itself out, the heavy lifting falls to the psychiatric doctors.

As a result the wait to see one of these people can be up to two years, and the average “consultation” lasts eight or nine minutes. For what this feels like at a personal level I recommend The Impossible City, a Hong Kong memoir, by Karen Cheung. Unfortunately you are unlikely to find this in your local library.

For comparison, while we have about 1,000 mental health professionals, we have 15,000 medical doctors of the conventional kind, 25,000 social workers, and 34,000 police people. Priorities?

Hong Kong’s aged citizens, of whom I am one, enjoy two unusual benefits, which partially at least compensate us for the absence of a meaningful system of pensions.

The less controversial one we owe to Mr Leung Chun-ying, who rarely gets a kind word from me but credit must be given. He had the idea that old people were greatly hampered in their movements by the proliferation of pedestrian bridges and walkways, all of which required us to climb a flight of stairs to gain access.

So a rolling programme has been in progress since Mr Leung’s term of office to provide a lift in every spot where a senile pedestrian might otherwise be faced with a flight of stairs.

This is not controversial with the SAR’s financial planners because it is not a fixed recurring item of expenditure. In times of austerity it can be slowed or even suspended. Indeed it has tended to proceed quite slowly. Any self-respecting Victorian engineer would have built a major terminus in the time it took to put a lift on the north side of Shatin station.

The other more tricky item came in so early in Mr Leung’s term that I suppose we must give at least some of the credit to another former chief executive whose praises I rarely sing: Mr Donald Tsang Yam-kuen. This allows us dinosaurs to travel on buses and trains at a flat rate of $2 a trip.

This is the sort of thing which gives our financial planners nightmares, because once granted it is difficult to withdraw, and the cost is much influenced by factors outside their control.

The spectre which haunts Hong Kong’s budgets is that one day there will be a massive submarine eruption and Hong Kong Island will suddenly triple in size, making land virtually worthless and cutting the government’s income from land auctions to a minus number, with developers seeking to be paid to build on the copious quantities of land available.

This has always seemed to me rather unlikely. After all a great bonanza threatened when the old airport closed in 1998, liberating a huge area of land already reclaimed and smoothed for aviation purposes. Somehow this was wrapped in red tape with such effectiveness that it has trickled out over the ensuing quarter century, and some of it is still being auctioned now.

The $2 a trip concession is a great boon, allowing old people to get out and about without worrying too much about the effect on even the flimsiest finances. Unfortunately this led Ms Carrie Lam into greatly expanding it in 2021, when the government needed a popularity boost.

The initial scheme only kicked in when you hit 65 years of age and covered only the MTR, buses and green minibuses. Ms Lam not only extended it to other forms of public transport but lowered the qualifying age to 60.

I must say that even those of my friends who are in the 60-65 bracket find the lowering of the age limit welcome, but a bit odd. After all most of us do not retire until 65, and people with meaningful or rewarding jobs often go on to 70. Many people these days live longer and healthier lives than they did when 65 became the conventional European retirement age 150 years ago.

Anyway whatever the merits of this arrangement it is beginning to look expensive. It is expected to cost more than $3 billion this year, rising over the next decade to $8.6 billion. It may well be that there are more focussed ways of helping the elderly poor which would be a better use for this money. It may also be, of course, that the figure for a decade away is hopelessly wrong. You cannot feel confident in 10-year predictions from a government which usually gets its one-year predictions wrong.

Still there are certainly some problems with the scheme. One is that at the moment (this is being changed with the introduction of a card with a picture of the holder on it) anyone can carry and use an aged Octopus card. There are in fact three times as many aged Octopuses in existence as there are aged people, which looks a bit suspicious. The MTR is the only transport means which still has people with no driving duties who check tickets occasionally, and it catches the vast majority of the 4,000 or so cases a year in which people are found using the wrong card.

A more subtle problem is found on the buses, where there is no control over passengers leaving, so everyone pays the fare to the end of the line. Passengers who are paying the real fare are consequently deterred from getting on a long-distance bus for a short trip.

If your fare is fixed at $2 on the other hand, the easiest way of – for example – getting a bus from Wanchai to Causeway Bay is to get on one bound for Chai Wan and get off at the next stop. The fare for the full trip is about $14, so the bus company will collect $12 from the government, which is nice for the bus company but a bit of a waste from the government’s point of view. I am not sure how widespread this sort of thing is, but there are certainly some people doing it, including (in emergencies) me.

A brutally simple solution would be to cancel all Ms Lam’s changes, but we cannot do that because it would be an admission of error on a large scale. A pleasantly non-committal one would be to wait and see whether the introduction of the more secure card – which rejoices in the lovely name of Joyyou – produces a reduction in the number of $2 trips, as the users of anonymous and fraudulent Octopusses drop out of the system.

But sooner or later I suppose we shall see the $2 trip changed to a $3 trip. This can be put down to inflation and blamed on the Americans, like everything else.

The largest press conference I ever attended was assembled to meet George Best. Mr Best had been a magical footballer for Manchester United in the 60s but was now past his peak and quite a long way down the other side of it.

The occasion was Mr Best’s recruitment by Fulham Football Club, then in the Second Division (now known as the Championship) and in need of reinforcements.

The only thing I remember about this occasion (it was a long time ago) is that a woman was sitting next to me, and exhibiting unmistakable signs of growing distress. It turned out that she was representing the Daily Mail, no less, but had discovered on her arrival that she had no pen with which to make notes. I was surreptitiously shocked: elite reporter, no pen?

Still, she had come to the right place. I was only present because Fulham had played Nottingham Forest – the team I followed for a Derby newspaper — that afternoon. There was no question of me being expected to write anything about Mr Best and I had time and leisure to come to the rescue of damsels in distress.

Also I had a bag. This was unusual in those days. My bag was marketed as a Reporter’s Bag, though I never met another reporter who had one. It hung from your shoulder and had room for the shorthand notepad which we all used in those days, with plenty of space for other things: spare pens and paper, a paperback book for long waits, a bar of chocolate for long waits which extended into mealtimes, a map of the area in which I might be expected to find interviewees, and so on.

So I was able to lend the unprepared Mail female a pen. This is as close as I ever got to working on Fleet Street: my spare Biro briefly reported for the Mail. I have often wondered since what Ms Mail was doing there. Female football reporters were as rare as hen’s teeth in those days and the Mail certainly had none. Perhaps she was from the celebrite substance abuse desk.

A quick conclusion for Mr Best’s fans of his part in the story. His stay at Fulham did not last long. It did though last long enough to include the reverse fixture in which they visited Nottingham. Mr Best did nothing spectacular and Fulham lost. Nevertheless the entire Nottingham Forest team trooped down the dressing room corridor afterwards to ask for his autograph. He was a legend.

The reason why this bit of distant history popped into my head the other day is that what was then a rather eccentric habit has now become commonplace. Men carry bags.

When I was a reporter this was almost unheard of. People like postmen who needed a bag for their work would of course carry one. Men who took work home, or wished it to be thought that they took work home, might carry a briefcase. The rest of us were expected to manage with our pockets.

These were much more numerous than they are now. As well as four in your trousers – two in the front, two in the back – you had at least two large pockets in the lower part of your jacket and another two – one inside and one outside – at the top. There was also a small pocket at the top of your shirtfront. People with respectable jobs were expected to wear a suit. Less respectable jobs like teaching and journalism might permit a jacket and trousers.

Generally on holidays, days off and such you still wore the jacket, though you might wear a less formal shirt and take the jacket off indoors. Nowadays, walking round Central on a weekday you might think that nothing has changed: hordes of men wear suits.

But walking round other places, where you meet lots of men who are for one reason or another not working, or at least not working in an office, the picture is completely different. Trousers have endured but tops are now routinely pocketless.

This has left men with a problem we did not have before, namely where to put all the stuff which for one reason or another you don’t want to leave home without: wallet, mobile phone, reading glasses, door keys, folding shopping bag, very small umbrella…

A popular solution to this problem is the rucksack. This has ample space, often comes with convenient subdivisions, and hangs on your back out of the way. I carried one for a while… and discovered the drawbacks: it leads to embarrassing collisions on crowded MTR trains, and has to be awkwardly twirled round to the front if you want to take anything out of it. It is also, I suppose, a pickpocket’s delight because you can’t really keep an eye on it.

And so to the increasing popularity of the shoulder bag, to which I recently returned myself. My current shoulder bag is much like the old one except that it has zipped compartments and is in a rather lurid colour, probably because it was not designed with men in mind. Most male users manage to find a black one.

One occasionally sees other kinds of bag on men. A sort of Bat Belt with one or more pouches hanging from it crops up. Some punters go for a bag which hangs diagonally across the chest. Careful examination, though, reveals one boundary which is never breached. No man carries anything which could be mistaken for a handbag. We are all more enlightened about sex differences these days, but there are limits.

According to one of the more suspicious interpretations of China’s intentions for Hong Kong, the future will look like this: decadent Western innovations like democracy, human rights and such will no longer be supplied. But the rule of law will continue as far as business is concerned.

This will preserve the city’s status as a place where foreign money can be sucked in, and the proceeds of success in the mainland can be transported out.

The implication of this is that some parts of the law will atrophy, and some will continue much as before. And that means, you might think, that contracts will continue to be enforced in the old way. Not so.

The government is now wheeling out provisions which make it clear that the sanctity of contract, like other kinds of sanctity, will get no protection if it conflicts with the current passion, which is national security.

Last September Ming Pao reported (in their translation)

Government Logistics Service added new terms and conditions in procurement and services last month, stating that for national security considerations, the government may disqualify individual bidders in procurement, and Terminate the contract during the contract. The project being tendered by the Logistics Department includes the procurement of toilet paper, the production of outlying islands, and the prevention of insect rats. A civil service organization said that the update clause meant that frontline colleagues would check the background of the bidding company in the future, and the Jide government provided clear guidance.

Ming Pao

Having ensured that the supply of toilet paper would be free from subversive influences we then went on to the supply of lands and works:

According to the department website, the new term allows the government to disqualify a bidder if it, its parent firm or the company it acts as an agent for “has engaged, is engaging, or is reasonably believed to have engaged or be engaging in any acts or activities that are likely to cause or constitute the occurrence of offences endangering national security.” The government can also reject bids “in the interest of national security” or for the protection of “the public interest of Hong Kong, public morals, public order or public safety.

HKFP

And on it went, last week, to new guidelines for aided schools entering into contracts for goods or services:

Schools should incorporate clauses into documents relating to quotations or tenders that would allow suppliers to be disqualified and contracts terminated “in the interest of national security,” the guidelines read. According to the clauses, schools may disqualify a supplier if it “has engaged, is engaging, or is reasonably believed to have engaged or be engaging in acts or activities that are likely to cause or constitute the occurrence of offences endangering national security” or to “protect the public interest of Hong Kong, public morals, public order or public safety.”

HKFP

Reactions to all this were understandably mixed. Suppliers of toilet paper and exterminators of insect rats held their counsel. On the other hand the lands and works announcement produced a swift swoon in the relevant stock prices. A legislator representing the education industry thought the new arrangement asked a lot of schools. Surely, he added, if a company or person had breached the law then the police would already have arrested them.

And this is a very good point. In our legal system it used to said that guilt or innocence was a matter to be determined by the courts, and until a finding of guilt came along we were all entitled to be presumed innocent.

Nobody could object to a government department or aided school abrogating a contract with a person or entity who/which had been convicted of endangering national security. But is anyone really going to cancel a contract on the grounds that it is “not in the public interest of Hong Kong” to continue with that supplier?

We must also note that in the long run a miscreant who has paid his debt to society should not be subjected to impediments to his participation in the economy after his release. Those who have been convicted and done their time are entitled to the presumption that they have been rehabilitated. Those who have not been convicted have every right to compete for the right to supply government toilet paper.

Cynical observers may discern in the new arrangements an attempt to create a “black list” of politically unreliable people who will not be able to do business with the government – or a “white list” of patriotic bidders which will have the same effect.

This is probably just a conspiracy theory. The fact is that the government has developed a consuming preoccupation with national security and every department is trying to score points by coming up with new measures to tick this box.

During the 20 years after the handover – and for that matter in the 20 years before it – national security was never mentioned in Hong Kong but seemed to manage just fine. Now our government has turned into the sort of over-protective parent who wants her kid to wear a cycling safety helmet when riding the school bus.

We have an obligation to protect national security. This does not require us to turn it into a paranoid preoccupation which poisons every aspect of life in the SAR.

It is difficult to keep up with the law these days. This is partly due to the occasional attempts to help by Mr Ronnie Tong SC, whose interventions often leave me confused.

For instance, there was his advice about the forthcoming effort to ban performance, writing, or indeed any sort of intercourse with the song which is Not Hong Kong’s National Anthem. Mr Tong thought it would still be OK if you sang the song in the bath.

I presume this was based on the theory that it would be all right if nobody could hear you. This seems to open up the possibility of a whole new legal genre of Zen jurisprudence, involving saffron robes, fishhead drums and the sound of one hand clapping. Sample question from the first Bar exam: if a man goes deep into the forest, where noone can hear him, and plays the March of the Volunteers … badly … on the kazoo, has an offence been committed?

More seriously, the solo in the bathroom suggestion sounds a bit dangerous. What if you are overheard and reported by a neighbour … or, as national security education marches through the local school system, your kid?

Nobody seems to be able to answer the obvious question about the government’s bid for an injunction against subversive sing-alongs: if the song is illegal, what need of an injunction? If it is not illegal, how can it be acceptable to ask a judge to make it so?

Another legal tangle surrounds the June 4 Celebratory Police Swoop on various individuals who were found in Wanchai or Causeway Bay wearing clothes, or carrying items, which suggested a desire to commemorate a historic non-happening.

It is apparently officially agreed that 23 people were “taken away” to police stations. None of them was in fact charged with anything. The police explanation was not helpful: they removed “those persons who were likely to cause a breach of the peace, from the scenes to police stations for enquiry.”

This conflates and confuses two different scenarios. Lawyers seem to agree that the police may legitimately remove people from the scene if their presence is giving rise to an imminent danger of large-scale disorder. A recent precedent, for example, involved a case where the court accepted that the hostile crowd heavily outnumbered the police presence. But if that was the reason here, why the need for enquiry?

Conversely, if the police suspected some crime was imminent, there might be a need for enquiry, but where was the evidence of that? In 2012 the High Court held that a breach of the peace must involve threats of or actual violence. A lady carrying a flower hardly seems to meet that requirement.

In a police letter to the Hong Kong Journalists Association, which complained because a reporter was among those “taken away”, the police line had changed a bit: officers were conducting “stop and search crime prevention work”, in a “high-risk area” where crimes such as disrupting public order and sedition had recently occurred.

The problem with this explanation is that “stop and search crime prevention work” does not usually involve a visit to a police station. My students often reported on their experience of “stop and search” incidents, which came in two categories: searches of the bags or backpacks of male students, or more genial chats with pretty females, often concluding with a polite request for a phone number. Nobody was ever invited to a police station.

Mr Tong’s take on all this was that “legally, if [the police] want to arrest a person they must have reasonable suspicion. The question is whether the police were arresting that person at that time. If they were inviting [the individual] to provide information at a police station and the person being taken away agreed to it, that would not be problematic.”

Mr Tong then prudently declined to go further in the absence of any detailed information. We are left with an interesting question. What is it about Hong Kong police stations that so many dissident politicians and eager commemorators were willing to drop their plans for the day to slot in a visit?

I have occasionally been invited to visit police stations, for press purposes or a drink or both. It was a pleasant experience. On the other hand you have to suspect that at least some of the 23 people were persuaded to agree by a threat of some kind, or indeed were simply bundled into a police vehicle without ceremony.

Not to worry. Mr Tong concluded comfortably that there were “many ways for individuals to complain about dissatisfactory police work”. You what? Was this a joke? The way for individuals to complain about dissatisfactory police work is to contact the Complaints Against Police Office, which is … part of the police force. The only alternative is to sue the Commissioner of Police, which is too expensive for most of us.

The CAPO system has been working for many years and has established a very clear track record. The Secretary for Justice recently noted that the 100 per cent success rate in achieving convictions for national security offences was evidence of the excellence and care of prosecutors. Well … other explanations are possible.

The system for dealing with complaints against police has a similarly stellar record: more than 99 per cent of cases filed end in a finding of “unpursuable”, “unsubstantiated”, or too trivial to attract any remedial action. Citizens afflicted by dissatisfactory police work have low expectations.

All this legal confusion is, I fear, the inevitable result of the police effectively taking over the government. It now looks like the man with a hammer to whom every problem looks like a nail. The cure for every social problem is a new law or higher penalties for infringing existing ones.

Ban that song, censor that film, criminalise failure to report abuse. Are people feeding pigeons? There should be a law against it. There will be. Drafting is already in progress.

Back in 2016 there was a minor scandal, by the standards of the time, when a rural grandee who was running a business unlawfully on a slab of government land refused to move off it, despite pleas from government officials who wished to use the plot for a public housing estate.

I had a certain amount of fun with this, as one did in those happier times, and made a variety of suggestions, not completely seriously, as to ways in which the rural squatter might be persuaded to move. Among them was this: “If that fails we could further point out to the recalcitrant individual that while the incidence of government inspections is random there are occasional coincidences, and he may find in the coming week that the Buildings Ordinance Office wishes to check his house for illegal alterations, the Food and Hygiene people would like a look at his kitchen, the Transport Department wishes to make sure his car has not been tweaked and the Agriculture and Fisheries Department wants to see his dog licence.”

This was intended to be a satirical comment on the fact that in the New Territories the rule of law is in practice much diluted, especially if you are well-connected in the local underworld, the local boards and committees or, as is regrettably common, both. So illegal structures rise undisturbed, unsanitary mass feasts are held in villages, cars are tweaked and dogs are rarely licensed. The rule of law is supplemented, if not replaced, by “live and let live”. Other examples could be cited.

Unfortunately a writer who enjoys skating jovially over the lighter side of an issue is in constant danger of being accused of heresy by someone who mistakes a joke for a serious suggestion. So after the publication of this particular piece I was scolded by a reader for suggesting that the government might use multiple inspections as a means of coercion. Such an action would be totally improper, said the reader, with which I entirely agree.

However, sometimes if you wait long enough life imitates art, and so it has done in this matter. I refer to the interesting history of Ms Debby Chan, who runs a shop in Sai Kung selling ethical merchandise and encouraging community events, recycling and other worthy causes.

Ms Chan supposes, plausibly, that her establishment attracts the sort of people who might be interested in a discreet observance of the May 4 non-event, so on April 23 she started offering small electric candles, decorated with “support the Tienanmen mothers”, to anyone who wanted one.

The very next day – apparently Saikung Store has some eager snitches among its clients – she was phoned by the police, who asked if she was proposing to seek a letter of no objection for a public event to commemorate the notorious non-happening. She said she had no plans to hold a public event.

The day after that, by a miraculous coincidence, staff from the Buildings Department turned up, asking to see Ms Chan’s business registration documents. Later she was visited by a different set of Buildings Department staff, who said they were investigating building safety problems.

The day after that a neighbour noticed, and photographed, a team from the Environmental Health Department taking pictures of the shop. The following day the department’s staff visited, saying they were investigating complaints about hygiene and blocked pavements.

Two hours later the Labour Department rolled up, for a “routine inspection” of staff insurance papers.

By this time one imagines Ms Chan had developed a pretty good idea of what was going on, and was perhaps not surprised when two policemen arrived to investigate a complaint that booze had been sold to minors.

It seems that Saikung police take this particular sort of complaint very seriously, because when visited by HKFP’s intrepid reporter on the Friday before Sensitive Sunday the shop was being watched from a police car across the road. The car stayed for at least five hours. Potential infant alcoholics are well protected in Saikung.

I would like to believe that the government has not yet sprouted a formal Office to Arrange for Politically-motivated Harassment, or OAF for short, to organise a barrage of visits to any business which is not toeing the New Approved Line.

The police said they were responding to a complaint, as did the hygiene cops. They both found the complaints unfounded. Still, there may well be someone in Saikung who sees it as his patriotic duty to arrange a hard time for subversive shopowners, using whatever means come to hand.

On the other hand that still leaves us with the Buildings Department (who have so far failed to provide any explanation) and the labour people’s “routine” visit. The problem with this is that for two rare visits to turn up in the same week is a bit of a stretch.

Let us suppose that a normal small business can expect a visit from the buildings and the labour people every five years or so. There are 52 weeks in a year, so the chance of both departments turning up in the same week is about one in 62,500.

Clearly Ms Chan is not taking her week of official visits as an everyday demonstration of the fickleness of the flying finger of Fate. There is an old military adage that if something bad happens once it is bad luck; twice is a coincidence; three times is enemy action. My reader was right. This sort of thing is unacceptable.

If Hong Kong officials are going to tell the world that Hong Kong still has the rule of law they should study its requirements, which include (according to the late Lord Bingham) “Ministers and public officers at all levels must exercise the powers conferred on them in good faith, fairly, for the purpose for which the powers were conferred, without exceeding the limits of such powers and not unreasonably.”

Also germane at this point is the report that a car was impounded on the Day when Nothing Happened in Tienanmen because it was driving through Causeway Bay and the number plate was US 8964.

I once spent many amusing mornings on the committee which vets applications for personal number plates. This is not a personal number plate; it is a routine local model: two letters and four digits. It came out of the Transport Department computer after US 8963 and before US 8965. Somewhere in Hong Kong there are certainly other number plates with 8964 following other letters.

The driver was told there was some problem with his brake and his number plate. These were clearly pretexts. An apology might be in order. But the Force does not do apologies. Is it surprising that police recruiters are finding it difficult to find eager takers for a career doing this sort of thing?

Mothers Day took a rather depressing turn this year, with new figures revealing that Hong Kong now has a world-beating figure – for not reproducing itself.

The average woman in the SAR can now be expected to have, according to different statistical gurus, .8 or .75 of a baby in her lifetime. You cannot have three quarters of a baby; the choice starts with zero or one. Some people still go on to two, three or more. So it must follow that a majority of Hong Kong women are not reaching one. They are not even reproducing themselves. Since the fertility rate for the other – male – part of the population is a flat zero this means that we are as a population shrinking quite rapidly.

This is to some extent a universal problem of wealthy societies. All the European Union countries, for example, have fertility rates below replacement (which, to allow for occasional accidents, is usually set at 2.1 babies per woman), with two of them (Spain and Malta) in the 1.1 region.

It may also be to some extent a national problem. The fertility rate for China as a whole is also about 1.1, a number which is reportedly causing some official concern.

The solution to this problem has so far been elusive. Paying people to have babies with grants or tax rebates seems to make no difference. Longer maternity leave doesn’t work everywhere; it depends on social attitudes to women in the workplace.

The availability of day care is important. One Japanese town has reported encouraging results from providing a centre where, with much volunteer help, you can leave your kid any time you need to, seven days a week etc.

Anyway this is a matter for sociologists and administrators to brood over. I would like to attempt the rather simpler matter of providing an answer to the plaintive cry reported by HKFP: “Why would anyone want a kid?”

This is a matter on which we are all entitled to our own opinions, and I mean no disrespect to people who take a different view or feel that circumstances do not leave them a choice.

I realise that some potential parents believe that – how shall I put this – our government’s admirable preoccupation with national security and development leaves a deficit of attention to other matters which are more germane to the decision whether to have a kid, like education, childcare and such like.

We must also respect the views of those who believe that, looking at global warming and the stuttering global response to it, they cannot feel confident that any kids they have now will have a comfortable, or even habitable, world to live in as adults.

Any comment from me could also provoke the reply from friends and acquaintances that my experience of parenthood was cushioned by two professional salaries, a domestic helper, and fringe benefits – allowances for housing, education, medicine – which are beyond the reach of most Hongkongers, and indeed are no longer supplied to the people now working in the jobs which we used to occupy.

And then there is the matter of who does the work, of which there is a lot. Far too many men think their contribution to parenthood is the essential 20 minutes of fun to get the thing started, and the rest can be left up to their partner. Marriages are not as stable as they used to be, so the possibility of being left a sole parent looms worryingly.

All these things are true, and yet… Parenthood is one of the great life experiences. It is not a bed of roses: there will be anxiety, disappointment, separation and, sooner or later, tears. There will also, one may hope, be moments of delirious happiness of a kind rarely presented by work or the sort of play that adults get up to.

As in other parts of life’s great banquet, some dishes will be sweet and some will be bitter. You do not get to choose and there is no guarantee of anything approaching fairness. The only promise is that there will be strong flavours.

So why would anyone want to have a kid? Because it’s exciting, rewarding, meaningful and a unique life experience. Many people who cannot, for one reason or another, have a kid really miss it. If you have the choice, make the most of it.

Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill. A pile of rubbish has accumulated over the overheard comments of three Cathay Pacific flight attendants, which included some satirical remarks about mainlanders and their problems with English and Cantonese.

China Daily, who else, thought this reflected a company culture which worshipped foreigners and looked down on mainlanders. Chief Executive John Lee said “The words and deeds of the flight attendants hurt the feelings of compatriots in Hong Kong and the mainland and destroyed Hong Kong’s traditional culture and values of respect and courtesy,”

The Standard devoted a whole editorial to the microscandal, raising the possibility of a boycott by aggrieved mainlanders. Had Cathay Pacific grovelled with sufficient ardour and humility to “resolve the crisis”, the newspaper wondered.

Can we all try to grow up? I realise that Chinese feelings are incredibly delicate but there is really nothing to see here. People in service industries seldom gather, as Adam Smith might have put it, even for merriment or diversion, but the conversation turns to complaints about their customers and employers.

After all adopting a servile attitude to complete strangers is an effort. One does it as part of the job but a certain subconscious resentment inevitably builds up. And some customers are, to put it gently, nicer than others.

When I worked in bars the eccentricities of customers were a routine subject for comment and discussion after work, some of it quite critical. I once had the onerous task of writing a feature about the Crazy Paris Show, a theatrical offering in Macau carefully described as “not a strip tease, but an artistic nude show”. In the hotel where the artistically nude ladies stayed I interviewed the only Brit, and was then offered a ride to the theatre with the cast on a coach. All the other ladies were French and assumed erroneously that I did not speak their language. So during the trip I overheard and enjoyed a distinctly scathing discussion in French of the customers and management. I did not report this.

This sort of thing has undoubtably been going on for a long time. Bertolt Brecht wrote a song about it for the “Threepenny Opera” which has survived as a single — “Pirate Jenny” in English – with versions by Nina Simone, Judy Collins, Steeleye Span and others. Original in German by the incomparable Lotte Lenya here.

Things airline passengers do which annoy flight attendants have also inspired Youtube offerings like this, this and this.

Griping about the customers in inevitable and probably universal. It is, though, an essential part of this popular hobby that it should be done out of the hearing of the people discussed, and this seems to be where our flight attendants went wrong: the complaining passenger, according to the Standard, “sat near the crew’s resting area [and] heard them complaining about customers”.

There is no reason to suppose that such complaints are particularly directed at mainlanders. As this was a flight from Chengdu most of the linguistically challenged passengers would have been mainlanders. No doubt a flight from Japan would have produced different, but similar, confusions over such things as the difference between “blanket” and “carpet”.

I dare say on flights from Europe notes and tips are exchanged on the important topic of which customers are getting totally wasted on the free plonk. So it goes.

The important lesson here is that airline passengers get bored with nothing to do, and they’ve all got phones. So if you are a flight attendant who wants to cut loose with some well-chosen words about the daft bat in seat 55C, save them for later, when you are safely out of earshot of the nosy parker in 77D.

It says in the Bible that God is always listening. These days He is rarely the only one.